Don’t read this one if you don’t like divisive politics

Psyop, meaning psychological operation, has felt like the word of the decade in political circles. Intro paragraphs are boring so I’ll cut right to the chase: just because America’s enemies support a cause, doesn’t mean that cause is bad or wrong. The USSR both rhetorically and covertly supported America’s Civil Rights Movement because they saw it as a way to take America down a peg. Yet morally the Civil Rights Movement was good regardless of who supported it. These days it seems you can’t have any political event without claims that Russia or China is supporting it and therefore it’s tainted and evil. This sort of closed-minded thinking short circuits any reasonable discussion and turns it into nationalistic chest beating instead because “you don’t support, Russia, do you?”

What’s most disturbing is how this type of Cold War thinking has infected the Liberal spaces which you’d think would be immune to it (given how much it was used against them just a decade and a half ago). I often find it sickening how I can find supposedly “Liberal” voices calling for the death of Edward Snowden on the grounds that he (*checks notes*) alerted Americans to the fact that the NSA was illegally wiretapping Americans without any oversight whatsoever. It seems that because all this happened on Obama’s watch, it has to be beyond criticism, and since Snowden fled to Russia, it means his actions prior to his flight are all evil by association. Regardless of the fact that Snowden is now a Kremlin asset who toes the party line for his own safety (a rather common situation in fascist dictatorships like Russia), his actions he took while in America shed light on the exact kind of mass surveillance program which was supposed to be closed after Bush left office, but which continued on regardless under a more Liberal president.

Then there’s the claims that the 2016 election was illegitimate since Russia’s intelligence agency launched a concerted campaign in support of Trump, nevermind that they also launched a concerted campaign in support of Black Lives Matter, the fact that Trump was helped by Russian psyops is proof of his illegitimacy, and proof that he was bought and paid for by Putin.

I’m no fan of Trump and have never voted for him, and I think Snowden’s actions in carrying water for Putin are disgraceful and themselves warrant prosecution. But it’s pretty short sighted to try to de-legitimize Trumps (undemocratic) victory in 2016 by pointing out that he was helped by Russia, when that notion just as easily de-legitimizes numerous causes that we should support. Trump was a bad president because of the things he did and the causes he supported, not because of who supported him. And it’s disgraceful to try to justify the USA’s zealous pursuit of Edward Snowden for leaking actual unconstitutional actions by the NSA based on the fact that his actions helped Russia. In this case, the interests of Putinist Russia and of the American citizens coincide if only by chance, Russia wanted to (again) take America down a peg and American citizens should want our fundamental rights to be respected. The fact that an action or a group or an individual is supported rhetorically or covertly by Russia is no reason to think that the cause or the individual themselves is a Russian asset, otherwise should we have tossed civil rights and BLM in the bin?